You must be careful. Even though I have never seen him be nice before to anyone
except John, you should take care. The stable lads are afraid of him. He’s
vicious.”
I finally looked back over to the paddock. I watched John put a bridle on
Tempest’s tossing head, then swing up onto his bare back. I watched them sail as
one over the far paddock fence. Soon they were gone from sight.
“Don’t ride that horse, Andy. John makes riding him look very easy, but it isn’t.
John is amazing, but he’s been a soldier for a very long time. He is used to
taming savage sorts of things.”
I could well believe that, but what savage sorts of things did Amelia mean,
precisely? I wasn’t afraid of him, curse his eyes.
“You seemed to be arguing with John. What about?”
“Nothing. You simply misunderstood.” Thank God Amelia didn’t say any more about
it. Ten minutes into my tour of the stables, I found a sprightly little Arabian
mare named Small Bess and promptly fell in love again. “His lordship jest
fetched her here three months ago,” Rucker, the head stable lad, said as he
scratched her ears. That meant, I thought, that he had not bought Small Bess for
me. What a pity.
“Why don’t ye ask his lordship?” Rucker said even as he began brushing her long
silver-gray mane. “I will, thank you, Rucker. Good-bye, Small Bess.”
“You may ask Uncle Lawrence at luncheon. He never said why he bought her, and no
one really asked. The stable lads have been riding her, no one else.”
“He didn’t buy her for me,” I said. “He didn’t even know me then.”
“We’ll see. Now, Andy, let me take you to the Black Chamber, where some say that
a long-ago Devbridge countess stabbed her lover.”
I felt the unnatural cold in that small black room the moment Amelia unlocked
the door and pushed it open. There was only a narrow cot in the room, nothing
else, not even a rug to cover the wide-boarded floor. The walls were painted
black. The single window was covered with a dark drapery. I couldn’t tell what
color, but close enough to black to make my flesh ripple. Amelia raised her
candle branch high.
“It’s a pit in here,” I said, backing toward the door. “I don’t want to stay in
here. It is depressing. It invites premonition and nerves.”
“Come along, don’t be a coward. It’s nothing. I wish there was something strange
in here, for my father’s sake, but I have never seen anything amiss with the
room other than some loon painted the walls black. Did a former countess really
stab her lover? I hate to admit it, but it does make an excellent story?but in
person, in here? No, it’s just a small black room. I suppose I could have it
painted white and put a nice lacy curtain on the window. What do you think?”
“It’s not right. Something is very wrong here. Don’t you feel it, Amelia?”
I was standing well behind her, not two feet from the door now. She was standing
in the center of the room, raising the candle branch high, sending the wispy
candlelight into all the black corners. “Feel what?”
“The coldness. The unnatural coldness. Cold and clammy, and it makes your skin
skitter and your heart jerk. It’s not right.”
She walked back to me, staring, her head cocked to one side. “What do you mean?
Oh, yes, I know my father speaks about how in some rooms there will be a certain
spot that makes one shiver because it is so suddenly and inexplicably cold. But
I don’t feel anything here.”
“I do,” I said, and quickly backed out of the room. “I don’t know about any
countess killing her lover, but there is something in there, Amelia, something
that’s malevolent and cold, and blacker than those walls.”
She was shaking her head at me, even smiling, as she pulled the door closed and
locked it. She didn’t believe me, obviously, but that was all right. I didn’t
want to believe myself. “Has your father ever visited that room?”
“No, Father hasn’t visited me here as of yet. Thomas and I have been married a